The design and technique of horseshoes and shoe nails have developed only a little. The basic technology has been the same throughout the history, the shoes and nails are in general of iron.
Nails of the horseshoes have always been made by forging or drawing of iron, nowadays mechanically. Due to the form of the nails, their production is slow and the price relatively high compared with wire nails made of the same material by drawing, used e.g. by the construction industry.
Attempts have been made to improve the industrial manufacturing process of the horseshoe nails e.g. by press cutting and other methods. The process of forging, however, provides the metal at the sharp point portion of the nail with hard but at the same time with required tensile characteristics. The nail is a sharp edged, thick headed spike narrowing evenly and with a length of about 4 to 6 cm. Evenly thick or round nails cannot be used as nails for horseshoes. The nail penetrating the hoof in the most preferable way must have the traditional form with a rectangular cross section.
When shoeing a horse, the nails are hit via the nail holes in the horseshoe through the keratin hoof of the horse so that the sharp point of the nail comes out from the side of the hoof. This visible part of the nail will be shortened by cutting, and bent downwards against the surface of the hoof. Thus, the nails form durable tight hooks fastening the shoe to the hoof of the horse. This procedure for securing and fastening the nail is called clenching.
Means, equipment, parts and methods made of materials of new technologies have been invented within other fields in order to develop these fields. Nothing essentially new has been developed for shoeing horses.